(12) Aimee Mann, “One”
broke the heart of
(5) Cowboy junkies, “sweet jane”
772-742
and will play in the championship

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/30/22.

“ANYONE WHO EVER HAD A HEART: LORRAINE BERRY ON COWBOY JUNKIES’ “SWEET JANE”

1.

“Sweet Lorraine,” recorded in 1940 by Nat King Cole, was the song that inspired my dad to name me. My mother had wanted to call me “Colette.” But in her northern English home, the sophistication of such a name left folks scratching their head. And while I love my name, its long “a” sound makes it feel much less delicate than all of those girls’ names that feature the breathy soft “a” of names like Angela or Ashley.
Sweet Jane is a girl whose name features that same harder a.

2.

When I heard Velvet Underground or, later, Lou Reed sing Sweet Jane as a kid, even though I didn’t understand the lyrics, the song sounded gritty, maybe even dangerous. When I heard it as a teen, still not listening closely to the lyrics, I assumed Lou Reed was singing about drugs.
The scenes of street life in NYC were what made the song cool for me eventually, but even then, I never really heard it as a romantic love song. It wasn’t until Margo Timmins emerged from the shadows of the video playing on MTV that Sweet Jane suddenly became a sensory caress that felt like it was ushering me into the slow-motion erotic catastrophes that was love in the 1980s.

3.

As a child in the 1970s, I would listen to my radio for hours in my room. The goal was to capture the new song I loved so much on my cassette recorder. Each song that was “it” was great, but in that space between songs when the DJ would be stepping on the intro of the song I wanted, I’d hit the record button. The blackout bingo were those sweet moments when two songs were played back-to-back without interruption, and the second song was the object of your quest. No voice breaking up those first few notes that you knew by heart.  
Watching MTV in the 1980s was the visual component of Radio-Cassette Bingo. Certain images could get you to love a video even if you didn’t like the song or the pretty boys who performed it.  Duran Duran taught me that.
The first time I heard “Sweet Jane,” by The Cowboy Junkies, the shadows pulled me in. That, and Margo Timmins’ ethereal Rapunzel waves of hair, something my own curly head would never accomplish.
It’s only now as I rewatch it that I see the things I missed. The moments when Timmins appears in color. The thorns. The chains. The things you don’t see about love when you’re in your mid-20s.

5.

I asked my husband a few weeks ago to watch Lou Reed perform “Sweet Jane” and then the Cowboy Junkies version. As someone whose music transmits itself in words, I wanted to hear what the guitar player heard.
The next day he unpacked his ivory-colored Taylor electric and sat down with me. “So,” he said, making sure he was tuned, “Lou’s live [“Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal”] version is in E,” and he plays the progression. “That’s where that chesty growl comes from. The studio version—like Mott the Hoople’s, like Cowboy Junkies—is in D, and more bouncy.
“Mott the Hoople added some pop to it with that ascending riff in the chorus....”

6.

In the 17th century, Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit and polymath, formed the connection that intervals in music convey colors. Others built upon his theory. In 1742, Louis Bertrand Castel developed a direct correspondence between specific notes and colors, and suggested the creation of a “le clavecin oculaire“ an instrument that would throw colored light out as it was played. Following his theory, DAG becomes green-violet-red. DABmG, however has the addition of agate, a gemstone that is known for the differently colored variants it produces.
My own synesthesia is not consistent, and disappeared for a long time after childhood. But in the past few years, it’s been back. Textures and tastes align with color. On a recent flight across the Rockies as I journeyed home to my beloved Cascades, toasted marshmallow flooded my mouth as I beheld the endless pillows and pillars below me.
With music, however, I don’t see color. I feel it in my body. Not the ways that a piece of music can cause you to resonate and set off the tinkling of bells in your spinal column. Or the way certain pieces of music make you weep.
I have somatic reactions to music, as if the emotions it sparks create their own physical manifestations. Suffusions that sometimes feel as if a rush of adrenaline has numbed my legs or set off the physiological responses that lead directly to migraine. Some songs inspire anxiety that becomes the sensation of panic attack.
But some songs I feel like an ache.
The Cowboy Junkies’ cover of “Sweet Jane” is one of these.

7.

Lou’s live version does not, however.
Instead, coming in as it does after what might be one of the best intros in live rock history, that one floods me with the razor blade blood pumping out of my heart.

8.

CJ was not the first band to cover the song, and there have been many more versions that have followed. “Sweet Jane” or “Sweet Jane covers” as a search term on YouTube yields dozens.
Diana Gameros and Los Refugios Tiernos, Mott the Hoople, Phish, Hollis Brown, Two Nice Girls, Brownsville Station, and Lone Justice are just some of the many artists who have interpreted the song. (There’s also a lullaby version I wish I had never heard.)
The song always seems to capture an emotion, or a moment in time that the artist was experiencing. It is pliable, labile that way. The most recent version I’ve heard is the one by Miley Cyrus and it scorches like a torch in a nightclub.

9.

Margo Timmins’ soft voice and the sweep and tap of the brushes were not the band’s original mode of play. But after receiving noise complaints about their rehearsal space-garage, they softened the playing and found their sound. In a 2001 article for No Depression, “We realized we had to tone down,” Michael Timmins explained. “One thing fed into the other: Margo began to realize that her singing voice was more effective quiet. We began to realize, if we can get down underneath Margo, the sound will be more effective. Pete picked up brushes – he was just learning to play drums at that point. Everything sort of came down. We learned to play with less volume."

10.

I met Yves in 2006. I’ve told the story elsewhere, but after a week of intense communication, I traveled to Montreal to spend Veteran’s Day Weekend with him. Our first several hours had us both convinced that we had discovered a serious love, but my last hours with him were spent tending to him while he suffered a fatal brain aneurysm.
The night before I met Yves, we talked on the phone. He told me that he was listening to a lot of 80’s music—that that was his mood. He would tell me later that he had been so nervous about meeting me that he had just wanted to get lost in old, familiar tunes. On the phone, I could hear something playing, but it was too faint to be anything other than background noise.
Later, after the events had transpired, I would find the playlist of what he had listened to that night. He was the Web master for his housing cooperative; he maintained a site that contained news about the co-op and playlists of music that the group’s members could stream. Those playlists would remain on the page until he posted whatever new songs had appealed to him. He always entitled his playlists “Playing while we hack.” If you happened to check the page while he wasn’t online, you’d find the most recently archived list, but where a new list should be, it would simply say, “Nothing… Our desktop’s speakers are silent.”
Nick Cave. Tom Waits. Gang of Four. X. Porno for Pyros. The stuff of a “working” song list that you might expect to hear from a man born just a few months before me in 1963.
He was a sound engineer, and I would meet many of the bands he had recorded at his memorial service.

11.

One of those songs on that list was the live version of “Sweet Jane,” recorded in 1973 and included on 1974’s Rock and Roll Animal.
I can’t listen to that version without instantly feeling an ache underneath my breastbone, the faint echoes of a trauma that made 2007 a rough year.

12.

CJ’s complete rearranging of “Sweet Jane” breaks my heart but in much different ways. It reminds me of the way love feels in your twenties, and the casually cruel boys who batter your faith in yourself.
The visual artist who invited me, who had been his lover, down to Berkeley to stay with him for a week. Then he made me sleep on the couch after he changed his mind about his intentions in asking me to fly down to him. Or the photographer who was more angry about the fact that a close friend and I had figured out that he was sleeping with both of us. “You two had no right to talk about our sex life.” As if the spilling of secrets far outweighed the breath-taking act of infidelity that neither of us had expected.  Or the musician who would let himself feel vulnerable with me for a week, and then disappear for weeks at a time in order to emotionally disengage, only to show up again and again at my place of work.
When I finally found a man who wanted to make an emotional commitment, he was a man of science, of facts to quantify, but a man whose connection to the muse came in kitchen chemistry—literally—but in no other way. I married him. And divorced him twelve years later.

13.

Margo Timmins once explained that CJ had originally intended to include “Sweet Jane” on their first album, Whites Off Earth Now! Problem was Timmins’ brother Pete the drummer had only been playing for a short time. When trying to hit the “stop” just before “heavenly wine and roses,” the two of them could not get the timing right.  
The best part of recording the song, she recounts in the video, was getting to meet Lou Reed. She looks starstruck as she recounts it. “Meeting Lou Reed was probably the highlight of my career.” She hesitates at the cliché, and then decides to go ahead. “Lou Reed gave me the soundtrack to my life.”

14.

When Lone Justice fronted by Maria McKee sang “Sweet Jane,” they turned it back into the hard-edged banger that more closely resembles Mott the Hoople’s version turned up to 11. As if Maria is kicking her boots at the CJs, telling them that they may have captured the sweet longing beneath the words with their version, but Sweet Jane was a salty woman, not the dreamy girl Margo channeled. When the song continues into “Walk on the Wild Side,” it’s clear that it’s Lou to whom Maria’s swearing her allegiance.

15.

In CJ’s video of the song, the thorns and chains appear as they are dragged across a bed. It summoned the eroticism of the famous photograph by Imogen Cunningham. I first saw the photograph The Unmade Bed when the artist who would later turn Berkeley into a sad space for me asked me to go to an exhibition with him. I remember being struck silent by the image, the hairpins, the shadows, the feeling that the lovers have just arisen and left love behind.
In the video, thorns, a heavy chain, a necklace, a rose crushed. And the woman’s hand clutching the side of the mattress, that sweet moment when one is the only object of your lover’s attention.
Sometimes, when Margo sings, sweet Jane sounds like sweet chain.
The CJ version whisks us away from the crowded New York City street and plops us right into the emotional territory.

And anyone who ever had a heart
They wouldn’t turn around and break it
And anyone who ever played a part
Oh wouldn’t turn around and hate it.

The CJ song starts with a verse much later in the original song, as if you’ve caught it being played for the thousandth time somewhere. But Margo Timmins’ voice catches your attention, and you hear the song anew.
It sounds like a plea from someone who is chiding a lover for not saying “I love you” more often. I’m not minimizing that sentiment. Unrequited love is debilitating, especially in those years when every emotion feels like the most important emotion you will ever, ever have.

16.

When Lou sings that verse, it’s right after a list of things that “evil mother(fuckers)” will tell you. And he grows angrier as he recounts the list. He blasts those who tell him that “And life is just to die!”
The song is narrated by Jack, who is driving his car, and Jane is in her vest. He’s talking to Jim, standing on the corner, who is really in a rock and roll band. Jack is recalling the past times; he’s a banker, after all, and Jane is a clerk. He has advice for the protesters: ignore the haters who tell them that they’ll never change anything.
Those folks who say that shit never had a heart anyway.

And there’s even some evil mothers
Well they’re gonna tell you that everything is just dirt
Y’know that women never really faint
And that villains always blink their eyes, woo.
And that, y’know, children are the only ones who blush!
And that life is just to die!

17.

It would take four years from age 38 to age 42 before I met Yves. In that time, I had discovered that the same types of men who had been unable to handle their emotions in their twenties were no closer to getting it right in their 40s. Only now, they wanted to “blame me for the rocks and baby bones and broken lock on the garden.”
I hear the heart weariness that Margo Timmins carries as she sings the song. She was 27. It sends its strum straight down to my lower belly, wondering if this time, erotic attraction is going to be enough to keep this goddamned relationship together. Because anyone who ever had a heart wouldn’t turn around and shit on the person with whom they had just made love.

18.

Everyone knows the story of how the Velvet Underground’s version of “Sweet Jane,” recorded on its fourth album, was not the song Reed had meant. The usual issues among band members meant that he wasn’t even in the studio when the song was recorded. But in 1973, he performed the song in all of its glory.
In the video of the performance, his band plays an intro that goes on for nearly four minutes, a demonstration of the players’ virtuosity that lifts the mood. Then Lou starts to sing.
Turns out that the VU didn’t get the intro right.  
Lou Reed once explained to  Elvis Costello that people often get the chord riff central to “Sweet Jane” wrong. And then he pulled out his guitar and showed the chord progression with the “secret” Bm chord. And despite the fact that it’s been repeatedly claimed that Cowboy Junkies version was his favorite cover, it lacks the hidden Bm chord.
It doesn’t make the song any less powerful. It just hits different.
A sweet ache. Not pain.

Infinity.
The guitar player and I met in 2008. We’re still together, finally deciding in 2019 that we should get married. He is a writer, too, and I finally found a man who combined being creative and being stable that had eluded me all those years.
I watch Cowboy Junkies now and I remember those years of the careless boys who broke my heart. Then watch Lou Reed rail against those who would strip us of our hopes and dreams.

You know, those were different times
Oh, all the poets, they studied rules of verse
And those ladies, they rolled their eyes

I like our cover best.

After 23 years of living on the other side of the continent, Lorraine Berry finally made it back to the Pacific Northwest, the place where she grew up. On her Twitter account (@BerryFLW), she frequently posts photos of trees and mountains and has recovered her sense of being right-sized. When not writing about books at various outlets, she is at work on a novel manuscript set in Seattle in the early 1980s. She lives in western Oregon with her husband, two dogs, and three cats. Her current goal is to learn to identify the 1980+ lichens of the PNW. 

NOT THE LONELIEST COVER YOU COULD EVER DO: BROOKE CHAMPAGNE ON AIMEE MANN’S “ONE” 

Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one.

She first made herself known not through sight, but sound. What did she sound like? Like a cartoon bubble bursting over my head. Like the bright pop sound Andy Williams makes in the chorus of The Chordettes’ 1958 song “Lollipop,” sticking his forefinger into his cheek and uncorking the champagne bottle of his mouth. Half-believing I dreamed the pop, I stood up from bed at 2 a.m. and felt a slow leaking, as if my body had forgotten how to hold itself together. At first I thought I was pissing myself. Suddenly, about a gallon of bloody water emptied from my vagina. 
My daughter was due in almost a month, but she’d be arriving today. Still, I had reasons to remain calm. The hospital was only one backroad mile from our house. My husband slept soundly next to my wet spot, but there was no need to wake him yet to pack a bag. I’d read that we wouldn’t need to leave till contractions were four minutes apart, and that was likely hours away. All I needed was my phone timer and something to do. And I knew just what that was. “Okay, this is good,” I thought. “I have papers to grade.”
It was the middle of the fall semester and I had subs to cover my classes, but I didn’t want to leave them with a full set of ungraded memoirs. Besides, I like reading student memoirs. What’s a “bad” one look like? Too self-centered? Too incomplete a narrative arc? Screw all that. My students share their lives with me. They may not completely plumb the depths of why things happen the way they do or what it all means, but they’re getting there. They open up to me in ways they may not with their parents, in ways that—holy shit—my daughter might also close off to me someday. Yes, I was already this far afield while timing contractions and commenting on my students’ uses of reflection and scene, entering grades ranging from A-minus to A-plus. Then, I was somewhere twenty years in the future: who would this early girl be, and what would she mean to me. I couldn’t imagine the answer; the question itself was terrifying.
In fact, the question required further distraction, so I scrolled through my DirecTV guide to where I usually find it: HBO. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia had just started—a perfect movie for the desperation I was masking. Then, I was nearly twenty years in the past, first watching the movie and hearing the dial tone as the song “One” begins, beep beep beep beep. The singer leaned on the word “one” so deeply, so coolly, “one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do…” The opening film credits revealed a magnolia blossoming at hyper-speed, followed by the slow unraveling of sad, lonely characters I would spend the next three hours only half paying attention to. Like I said, I’d seen them all before.

Now I spend my time just making thoughts of yesterday.

She first made herself known not through sound, but sight. In my second year of college, my mom’s best friend Gloria burned me a CD with a homemade cover design. She often made me gifts like this, introduced me to R.E.M. and Radiohead and all the Gen X coolness I’d always been slightly too young for. On this CD, a long, lanky woman, blonde and cool-looking, like Gloria herself, wore a tankini and her name written in script across her body: Aimee Mann. Oh boy, I thought, another beautiful, blonde singer. But I trusted Gloria. She’d never married or had kids, and so from my purview her life comprised of great-art consumption, astute political commentary, and believing in me. She cheered my amorphous writing ambitions, even masochistically asked to read early drafts.
Gloria wasn’t an artist, but loved art in all its forms. She could name all the architects who designed her favorite buildings in our hometown of New Orleans, and she was fun; she knew every rooftop bar in town. Because my mother spent much of her adult life raising three daughters, three stepdaughters, and cycling through three husbands, she didn’t have as much time to slow down, pay attention. Whether or not a piece of art or music or film was beautiful didn’t much matter. My mother rarely analyzed, or let a thought or feeling linger. She accepted a breadth or dearth of beauty, and moved on. At that time, in college, I saw in these two women two discrete paths for womanhood. The Gloria path was glorious. Freedom, one-ness, living life mostly for yourself. Though my mother is no martyr, I feared choosing her path would mean my own martyrdom. To be encumbered, constantly needed and tired, having little time to contemplate art and the self in the one life I was living. I needed time. I wanted to write, to make art, like this childless, beautiful Aimee Mann.
Because I wanted to impress Gloria, I didn’t just listen to Aimee Mann, I studied her. I read somewhere that Anderson wrote the screenplay with Mann in mind, that he wanted his movie to be the equivalent of an Aimee Mann album. In that sense, the film was a cover of Mann’s musical oeuvre established in the early-mid 90s. The soundtrack’s first song, “One,” opens the film, and it wasn’t immediately my favorite. The song contains no images. It’s pure argumentative lament. When I first heard the album from start to finish, I was most gripped by the track “Save Me.” It begins with the lines, “You look like a perfect fit / For a girl in need of a tourniquet.” If you’ve ever really loved someone who’s damaged, or been that damaged person, it’s a perfect simile.
Anyway, “One” is an ostensibly simple song with simple lyrics. The relationship referenced is one where a presumed lover, or loved one, is gone. That’s all we know. When I first heard it, the English major in me found it fascinating to hear that one was a number you could “do.” As in: enact, or perform. The rest of the song felt pointless to deconstruct. “One” is lonely, “no is the saddest experience…”, yes, I get it. I remember sometime after Gloria burned the CD for me, I asked her what she thought of the song, to confirm if I was correct about it. She laughed and said, “Well, yeah, it’s sad, but ‘one’ isn’t always the loneliest number.” Given that I planned to take her solitary path, I was glad to hear it.
Over the years, as I dug further into Mann’s oeuvre, I learned “One” was a cover with interesting tweaks to the 1968 Harry Nilsson original. Mann’s version includes an electric guitar, and her tone makes the song’s argument more starkly than Nilsson. He sings “one is the loneliest number” like it’s a suggestion; when Mann sings it, “one’s” loneliness is fact. But what I love most about the cover is how much Mann relies on Nilsson’s voice, both at the opening and closing of the song. In the opening, just after the beep beep of the dial tone, we hear a male voice shout, “Okay, Mr. Mix!” Which feels totally weird and nonsensical. Turns out it’s Nilsson, from another of his tracks called “Cuddly Toy.” And as “One’s” final cryptic line concludes—one is a number divided by two—Mann’s voice recedes, and Nilsson’s enters again. He sings the following lines, which are not lyrics from “One,” but from another of his songs called “Together”:

And one has decided to bring down the curtain
And one thing’s for certain
There’s nothing to keep them together.

I knew none of this when I obsessively listened to the soundtrack, but hearing a song titled “Together” superimposed over “One” is a bit ironic, and something that two decades ago, I could’ve written an A-plus paper about. Now, thinking about my relationship with Gloria, the song, and my daughter, who six years ago was in the process of being born as I listened to “One” while timing contractions, I’m considering the nature of covers. What makes a good cover? What should a cover song do? As in: enact, or perform. According to Ray Padgett’s book on cover songs called Cover Me, musicians worried for years that if their song was covered successfully, that meant an erasure of their original. Padgett vehemently disagrees with that conclusion. For him, a cover expands the original, adds new textures and contexts, invites a new audience to enjoy the update and revisit the old. In other words, a successful cover only makes the original stronger.

It's just no good anymore since you went away.

She made herself known that balmy January day of 2022 not through sight, or sound, but smell. Warm jambalaya and cold, olive-stuffed muffulettas waited upstairs at Schoen & Son Funeral Home on Canal Street in New Orleans, where my mother and I would eat after we’d said goodbye to Gloria.
Though I didn’t speak at the memorial, I thought a lot about what I’d say. One of the things that made Gloria the best was that she was legitimately interested in what I thought, which stroked my ego in a way my busy mother couldn’t always do. But she was also interested in everyone else, too. There was some artistry, I suppose, in how she plumbed the depths of why people were the way they were. This is why she had so many conservative friends despite being one of the most politically liberal people I knew. Proof was all around me in the hundreds at the memorial, a great gathering of both the masked and unmasked.
The first to eulogize her was a young attorney, one of many for whom Gloria worked at the downtown law firm where she and my mother were legal secretaries for almost four decades. The attorney made a joke about the great unmasked, saying it was a testament to Gloria’s patience and grace that there were so many Trump supporters in the room. It reminded me that when Trump first came down that godforsaken escalator, right around the time Gloria was diagnosed with breast cancer (proof that if there’s a god, he’s a bastard), I raged and scoffed at the stupidity of anyone who could consider this monstrous moron as anything but a joke. Gloria reminded me that listening to others’ wrong-headed ideas only strengthens our positions, because we’re empathizing where they won’t.
Over a dozen people spoke beautifully at the memorial, including members of the great unmasked, but it was her college-aged niece whose impromptu speech most touched me. “I didn’t plan to say anything, but, my Aunt Gloria, there’s probably no other person as responsible for making me who I am as she was. She shared with me what was good, what was cool. Every piece of music I listen to or television I watch and love is because of her. I can’t imagine not being able to talk to her about any of it anymore.”
But silence touched me as well. During the parade of memorial speakers, I asked my mother if she wanted to say something, said I’d hold her hand and walk up there with her, if she liked. She just gently shook her head, and later, in the privacy of plating our jambalaya and muffulettas, said it’d been enough for her to tell Gloria’s family everything she felt, what losing her meant—losing the best friend she’d ever had, losing a piece of herself. In Gloria’s final days under home hospice care, Mom had been with her. She held her hand, watched her slowly go. She didn’t need to enact or perform her love.

One is a number divided by two

It’s sad, embarrassing really, how much I learned about Gloria from her obituary and memorial, simple facts I’d never bothered asking her about. Like me, she attended Nicholls State in Thibodaux, LA (a.k.a. Harvard on the Bayou), and graduated from LSU. How had we never discussed that? She was born earlier than I’d thought, in 1958, the same year, in fact, that Andy Williams swiped inside his cheek in the chorus of The Chordettes’ “Lollipop,” the very first sound I conjured when my water broke. The song “Lollipop” itself is a cover, first recorded by a long-forgotten duo named Ronald & Ruby. The oddly, wonderfully comparable sound would’ve never entered my mind upon my daughter’s arrival had it not been for The Chordettes and Andy Williams’ famous pop.
Covers are so ubiquitous now that we take for granted the term itself—why they’re called covers at all—and as stated in Padgett’s Cover Me, there are three theories for its derivation. The first is that a music label would “cover its bets” by releasing a recording of a popular song; in the second, the idea was that the new version would literally “cover up” the old on record store shelves; and the third, most capitalistic theory was how music label execs would answer, when asked if they had any copycat versions of a popular song to release: “we’ve got it covered!”
I can’t help but find a metaphor in these theories, and how they apply to the relationships I’ve held most dearly. Having a child is a way to cover your bets: if you can’t get everything you want out of this life, maybe your child can. Maybe they can cover up your shittiness, your aging, your (hopefully) slow bodily unraveling. If you choose to have children, a secret, sacred hope is that when you get old, they’ll care for you; they’ll have you covered.
Before deciding to have children, and still, I’ve been both afraid to be covered, and afraid not to be. I’ve feared motherhood would mean half-measures in artistry, and vice versa. And I’ve feared the obverse: that without motherhood, I’d have no excuse, no cover, for my mediocre art. But in listening to “One” again to write this essay, perhaps more obsessively than I did twenty years ago, after re-hearing the lament and singularity of being one, I see that although I planned to take Gloria’s path, and instead took my mother’s, the two paths weren’t discrete at all. The overlap lives in their love for each other. “One” can be sad, but “two” can be, too, and children won’t always cover our loneliness, or any other parts of us that need covering. This essay is an inadequate cover for the originality, the oneness, of Gloria. And of Aimee Mann. And of being a mother to my daughter and a daughter to my mother. But I’m making this cover, anyway. I’m still singing the song I’ve heard before, only singing it differently.
I’ve learned, too, that just the concept of covers is relatively modern. Before the advent of rock n’ roll, it was the song that was paramount, not the singer. The quality of the song mattered more than the person performing it. So to extend that cover-as-relationship metaphor, if my daughter is my cover, the question isn’t what she makes of me, or I of her; the singular song she makes of her life is what counts. My daughter, my cover, who first made herself known, truly, not through sight or sound or smell, but touch. After twelve hours of labor, when she crowned, then blinked, then screamed, I brought her to my breast, and tasted what it was for me to be born into someone irrevocably different, both alone and not alone, not joined together anymore, but not two, either, and never quite one again.

Brooke Champagne was born and raised in New Orleans, LA and now writes and teaches in Tuscaloosa at the University of Alabama. She was awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay for her piece “Exercises,“ which was published in The Normal School and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2019, and was a finalist for the 2019 Lamar York Prize in Nonfiction for her essay “Bugginess.” Her writing has appeared widely in print and online journals, most recently in Under the Sun, Barrelhouse, and Hunger Mountain. She is seeking publication for her first collection of personal essays entitled Nola Face.